Republic

Plato's Republic is an ancient primary philosophical text with no modern publisher or single publication year of its own, cited here specifically for the myth of Er that closes book ten, where the three Moirai sit around the spindle of Necessity. Its strength is that it is Plato's own account, in his own words as transmitted, of a myth that later shaped much subsequent thinking about fate and the afterlife. Its limit is the ordinary one for any ancient text read in translation: how a given English rendering handles Plato's own Greek terms shapes what a reader takes from the passage, so the specific translation consulted matters.